What’s RescueTime?

RescueTime is a time direction &amp; Productivity software company founded in 2008. The RescueTime program runs in the background of your devices measuring monitoring and categorizing your activity.

RescueTime is a free app with a premium upgrade That allows attributes and more reporting like offline time input. It delivers a reporting dash with your information diced chopped and sorted into helpful charts to assist you manage your own time.

The program relies on Peter Drucker’s (the famous Management consultant) maxim that”what gets measured, gets managed.”

RescueTime requires the manual tracking of time So you truly track your own time so that and makes it automatic and painless .

That said, there are dozens and dozens of Productivity &amp; time management tools online. What are the real pros &amp; cons of RescueTime? Here’s what I’ve noticed over the years.

Disclosure — I get referral fees Mentioned on this site. Any info or opinions are all based on my experience as consultant to a client or a client. Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time

Rescuing Your Time

RescumeTime is a productivity tool in the, to reiterate Feel that it helps your time-management skills improve. It gathers data about the programs and websites you use, then generates reports based on that information.

You create an account and install a to Begin Desktop app in your personal computer (s) and optionally a cell app on Android apparatus ) There’s no iOS program because the operating system prevents RescueTime from amassing the data it needs to perform its purpose. Those programs quietly and invisibly track which programs you use and which websites you visit, as well as the quantity of time spent on these.

The tough nut to crack is how to make sense of all that information. To get the best results, you have to customize your account from the RescueTime website and tell the app more about what you believe productive versus unproductive action. The further you fine-tune it to your particular circumstances, the greater your results. As an example, somebody who operates in the finances industry might classify reading financial news on sites including MarketWatch and FT.com as a productivity task, whereas for me, that is an unproductive use of time.

You can categorize every app and site on a 5-point Scale of very productive, productive, impartial, dependable, and very unproductive. You could also categorize activity into perform categorizes. For example, I record Google Docs as very productive, and I categorized it as Writing, and it will be a subcategory of Layout and Composition. Looking at Redfin.com is very distracting when I’m trying to function, and I have categorized it as such.

In the desktop app, there’s a simple set of controls That lets you pause RescueTime for 15 minutes, 1 hour, or till tomorrow, providing you easy access to shifting the program off for days or breaks when you wrap up early.

Privacy

When confronted with RescueTime’s proposition–We will monitor All you do and provide you insights about your habits! –some individuals might, justifiably, worry about their privacy and the safety of information in their own hardware. Should you work with sensitive info online or store sensitive information on your computers and mobile devices, you’ll want to browse RescueTime’s privacy and security statements closely.

For everybody RescueTime’s privacy policy Includes a summary on very top, just a couple of stiff lines that are worth studying.

If your concerns are somewhat more relaxed and You Just Don’t Want RescueTime monitoring you on the weekend, you have control over the days and times the app monitors your behaviour. You can easily set it to only watch your activity from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, or whatever schedule suits you.

Reports

I’ve used RescueTime for years, and that I do not check my Every day, productivity reports. I love to allow the service run in the background so that when I do want to get a better image of how I’ve been spending my own time, a fantastic quantity of information is awaiting me.

When I do go through the reports, however, they are Magnificent. I love the variety, providing you get numerous ways of knowing your productivity and habits, from bar charts and pie charts that show lump sums of activity, to line items of applications you employed.

1 simple but effective piece of advice RescueTime Provides is an analysis of when during the daytime you are inclined to be the most productive. I wasn’t surprised to see that my brain peaks in the morning and slacks off after 2:00 p.m., as that fits pretty well with everything I understand about my customs. If you’ve never studied your productivity, however, that might be a beneficial revelation for you, one that might help you schedule your times more .

The more time you use RescueTime Premium, the more useful the Data becomes, because you may view your data daily, week, month, or year. And as you might expect, it is possible to toggle that times and days RescueTime records your action so that it works automatically on weekends, for instance. Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time

Additional Features

Much of the value you get from RescueTime comes from what You make of this data and the way you use that data to affect your own behavior. Changing behaviour is hard, but getting rich insights does not have to be.

Among the manners RescueTime makes it Simple to understand how To interpret all of the information that it collects is with a Productivity Pulse score. This daily score, shown as a percent, comes from calculating the percent of time spent on very productive, productive, neutral, unproductive, and very unproductive tasks. To be clear, nobody is advocating you target to get a 100 percent Productivity Pulse score.

A RescueTime blog post explaining the productivity Score notes that the typical score is 67 percent, and the average is 79 percent. The majority of people need to do some work that is not considered”very productive” throughout daily. The entire point of using RescueTime will be to help you work out how to focus on productive and very productive tasks if you need to and possibly save productive tasks for times when your ability to concentrate was waning anyway.

Productive tasks are not exactly the Exact Same thing as distractions. RescueTime has a simple and smart feature for controlling behaviour that is unwanted, such as getting sucked into websites that are deflecting . A feature named FocusTime, when enabled, blocks your ability to access. It customization and takes a little setup, but it’s quite powerful after it’s ready to deploy. As an example, let us say you wish to finish a report, and to make progress on it, you really need to focus hardcore for the next thirty minutes. It may prevent you from taking a look at email, posting on Twitter, checking sports scores, or other sites and actions, and switch FocusTime you deem distracting.

The RescueTime mobile program has Silence your phone you enable FocusTime. Likewise, you may set up other automation with the help of third-party services IFTTTFree at iTunes Store and Zapier to block or silence other distractions. By way of instance, you can make a rule with IFTTT (it stands for”if this, then that”) that says,”When I enable FocusTime, then automatically set my Slack standing to busy.”

RescueTime also gives you the option to log time computer Idle moment. Any time RescueTime finds that the computer was idle for several minutes in a row, so it pops up a dialogue asking if you were in a meeting, on the phone, taking rest, and so on, and lets you categorize the idle time accordingly.

Advantages of RescueTime

Here is a Number of the advantages of utilizing RescueTime Over other solutions. Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time

Feature Set

At its heart, RescueTime does one thing — monitor time. It’s not super special When you look at it like this. Technically, you can do any of the dozens of programs that are free or this using a spreadsheet on the internet.

But RescueTime’s attribute set The way that it monitors time and exactly what it does with all the data (aka, one you’ll really use).

RescueTime watches which windows currently have Activity, looks at times, and the window title the activity in that window. It is constantly running in the background watching.

Unobtrustive makes RescueTime rewarding. There’s not any friction or hurdle to monitoring time.

Since RescueTime’s monitoring feature simplifies that Problem, you will have data that’s complete, correct & useful.

RescueTime’s other attributes focus on producing their Core attribute better. They don’t try to include on complementary characteristics like time-tracking &amp; billing for freelancers. They don’t try to enter any side companies.

They do have a few attributes that use the tracking Feature in an interesting manner. By Way of Example, the Get Focused! From running when selected feature blocks distracting sites and/or programs.

They have aims and alerts that allow you to decide What when X occurs, you want to happen — and RescueTime can do that based on what it’s monitoring.

I love how RescueTime does Offline Time Tracking. Instead of being required to search and put in it in 100% manually, you select a time interval that is unlogged and fill in the blank.

You can customize the buttons to make logging Offline time quick and easy.

It’s a feature set — but that What makes it great. It’s well-done, straightforward and simple.

Pricing and Plans

RescueTime provides two tiers of service: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 a month or $72 per year). Firms or organizations that want to use RescueTime across a bunch of people pay the same speed.

RescueTime Lite offers Tracked his or her time before. The app monitors which websites and applications you use, and how long you spend on or in each of these. You may categorize every program and website you are using on a Productive/Unproductive scale, also RescueTime generates a few primary reports demonstrating the best way to spend your own time. Lite members can place weekly goals, such as”spend X hours each week on productive jobs and fewer than Y moments on unproductive items.” It’s possible to find a weekly report email. For reports, you are limited to some three-month history.

Subscribers get everything in the Lite plan, Plus reports and features, such as an unlimited report history. Premium comes with alarms you can enable for when you reach on objectives. You can more accurately log time spent away from the computer, noting whether you were in a meeting, on a telephone call, or just out to dinner. Furthermore, there is a Get Focused alternative, which permits you to block websites you place. Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time

Assessing RescueTime’s cost to that of other apps Needs an open mind as few programs do precisely what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one and it charges a flat fee of $40.

We can, but look at more traditional time-tracking Programs for freelancers that typically contain tools for invoices. HarvestFree in Harvest is a decent example. At $12 per individual per month for Premium, it costs over RescueTime, but it’s a very clear return on investment because it helps to ensure more accurate billing. How you’ll interpret RescueTime’s reports and make better use of your time as a consequence is much less clear.

Toggl Popular among freelancers, costs $9 a month, and it also gives you clear tools for monitoring time spent on projects with the usual end aim of billing customers. Toggl does not contain its own invoicing tools, but it has several integration options for linking with other invoicing services.

A Couple of programs are closer to RescueTime in what they have to Offer, such as Slife, although they tend to have fewer attributes even if they are free (and Slife is).

Either way — RescueTime is a no-brainer pricing-wise. It’s free to use.

And if the reporting/advanced attributes save you only 1 hour per month it is paid for itself even if you are only earning US minimum wage.

RescueTime is an investment that makes sense.

Program Quality

A common problem with monitoring programs of all kinds is That they have to be on. The”always on” feature can lead to performance problems on laptops &amp; desktop computers. It can induce battery issues .

But in my experience, RescueTime causes neither. It’s running on also my Nexus 5x phone, my Windows PC, along with my Macbook Pro. I have never tracked any battery life or functionality problems.

It’s lightweight and well-built.

I enjoy the fact that the app doesn’t demand Heaps of permissions that are absurd. It requires access but doesn’t attempt to track contacts location, emails, or any of the privacy that is normal violating apps that are permissions ask for.

It’s quick to set up and syncs using an online dashboard. It pulls in data from all sources at the time, and crunches on the data if you are on the Premium plan or by next day on the program.

Reporting

What is the point of information if it can’t be interpreted by you ? Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time

RescueTime’s accounts solves this problem — and in Lots of ways is the point of using the app.

RescueTime’s Dashboard uses colorful bar and Pie graphs to show just what you are (and aren’t ) doing.

You can opt to receive reports Daily, Week or month.

And on Top of That, you can dig to the Reporting with various filters and overlays to find your customs out.

It to see that the actual amount of Time that each task takes.

When I working for a marketing agency in Atlanta — The time tracked to Instant Messages and Gchats was astonishing. It altered processes not only for me personally, but also my job managers.

Now that I’m on my own I will see the precise time I devote to tasks that matter. I am able to build my entire day around those.

And Simply to reiterate — all the reports are Built-in to the computer software. The Dashboard is on my default — and even advanced reports are pre-built.

It’s all effective, seamless and quick so that you While assessing your time Are not ironically currently wasting time.

Integrations

Among the key selling points of RescueTime is their feature set minimalism. They do something and they do it nicely.

That said — many people using their product Have software needs that are time-based. Whether it’s charging project management, team time monitoring or anything your time needs usually do not stop with categorization, measuring and monitoring.

To solve that Issue, RescueTime’s applications Integrates with a range. They have integrations and an open API with applications that is common.

Whether you are Time monitoring into even a job manager that must collate staff member’s time or invoicing software like FreshBooks, RescueTime will likely integrate with it.

Disadvantages of RescueTime

Like any applications though — RescueTime is Perfect nor is it the best fit for everyone. Here’s some disadvantages that I’ve noticed through the years. Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time

Default Get Focused! Groups

Generally, RescueTime’s categories are fairly good. Sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter are”Very Distracting”…for most people. And for general monitoring, RescueTime’s classes are fast &amp; easy to repair.

But RescueTime’s categories can be away with general News, research websites and sites’ subdomains.

I can not use the Get Focused! Performance for any Task that requires research (aka visiting a lot of different websites).

Paradoxically, the time I need smart blocking Performance is when I’m doing research for a post

There is a fine line between this is productive and This is distracting when I’m researching. It would be good to use RescueTime, but the categories are not accurate enough for it to operate.

The root issue is that the Block Sites work Is not available in reverse (ie, add certain sites to block). I can only add websites to unblock.

And if I’m visiting dozen blocked websites — Adding them becomes the time wasting.

If you are looking for an program that will block only Specific sites — RescueTime isn’t it.

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

If you do the wrong thing for 18 hours per day, Every day with ideal focus — you are still doing the incorrect thing.

The most important Element in time management is to Work on the things that are right — the core 20% of time input which will generate 80 percent of your results.

And that is a element that is 100% on you. RescueTime Can’t fix that issue.

Actually, in some ways, RescueTime can damage your By pushing you towards efficient doing over research strategy and planning efforts.

If effectiveness is your core issue, then RescueTime isn’t for you. It’ll only make matters worse.

Instead, I’d recommend reading some of them books.

Wrap-up

RescueTime has been an invaluable tool for me. It is not for everyone and has pitfalls and some feature quirks.

That said, the best thing it’s supplied is perspective. It’s easy to believe you”work a ton” or are”not hooked on a phone” or”invest so much time composing” or are”hardly ever on Facebook.”

But the information does not lie. And using RescueTime to Get precise time data on your digital time will be able to help you rescue your own time and place your life. Greatest Rescue Mission Of All Time